New Moon (40 page)

Why this one victory, so paltry and late, should have obsessed not only me but thirteen other seniors is, in retrospect, baffling; yet we threw our heart and hopes into it. Finally one of the coaches suggested that if we were so gung-ho, we try flooding the tennis courts. Grateful to be let out of a day of body-building, we spent an entire gym period on this foolhardy adventure. A hose was dragged out of its frozen coat, ripping up ice as it dragged along; then liquid toppled out in sputters and sloshed over snow. Drifts filled with water and caked. Those of us with shovels pushed snow against the fence, forming barriers to keep potential ice from running out.

It was an engineering impossibility and, though we were laughing, our soaked shoes eventually froze, making for an unpleasant
ride home. The next day I tried gliding on the surface we had laid, but after two strides I went through it. It recalled my dreams of skating down winter streets that became summer ponds with lily pads and turtles.

Finally we got permission to hike to the Broadway rink with our coach. From PE we marched out of Horace Mann, down the hill, along the El, through the aromatic zone of the industrial bakery, through the many lands that bordered our hermitage, unvisited these many years—factories, warehouses, groceries, hardware stores, restaurant outlets: the Bronx. Carrying skates and sticks, bubbling with enthusiasm, we came to the outer gate only to find that the rink had already been rented to a girls’ school.

I peered over the wall. Half the ice was lost to warm weather anyway. On the other half, girls, so many in different colored clothes like flags of different nations, were skating there—had been, in fact, all winter.

That image became my harbinger for the dissolution of Horace Mann, a rigorous academy crumbling into something without boundaries or definition. HM of yore had held the world in place while we bumbled through adolescence. The half rink with its female flags was blithe and common, way too lenient a replacement for all that we had braved and survived.

Some of my hockey friends had access to cars, and during spring vacation a gang of them drove up to Grossinger’s. Just like that, no mention to PG! I left word at the front gate and they zipped on through.

After the rink closed for the guests that afternoon, we designated colored squares along the wall for goals, then played in various combinations of four on four, using rink master Irv Jaffee to round out the teams. He whizzed in and out of us, the old fox, teasing with the puck, ritually shouting, “Keep it on the ice, boys,” which was hard for kids used to zinging it. But there was plenty of expensive glass at stake.

One afternoon near the end of February I bought a
New York Post
for the subway ride home. Whereas once I would have thought only of getting as much of a head start as I could on my homework, now I combed the sports for every last morsel of baseball. There were only spring-training dregs, so I read the hockey news even though I didn’t follow the sport.

I knew the basic storyline from banter among my friends: the Rangers, a perennially bad team, had been in the upper echelon through the early part of the season after picking up elite defenseman Doug Harvey from the mighty Montreal Canadians near the end of his career. He had provided heretofore absent leadership, but now they had fallen into a battle with Detroit for the fourth and final playoff spot. That night they were playing the last-place Boston Bruins at Madison Square Garden. The
Post
said they had just traded for a defenseman named Pete Goegan. His diphthonged name was the trigger: I liked the “oe” between “g’s.”

I had never seen a hockey game, or, for that matter, any pro sport but baseball. But I wanted to know what the game looked like, so I stayed on the IRT till 59th Street and showed up at Bob’s office. Hunched over drawings with his art director, my stepfather turned and looked at me. “What’s up, Rich?” he asked impatiently, understatement hiding his astonishment at this after-school visit. I showed him the
Post
and asked if he wanted to go to the Rangers game.

He scanned the article and underwent a flip of moods. “You know something—you and I have never once been to the Garden. I used to live there.” Breaking all precedent, he called Bridey and told her not to expect us for dinner. We ate quickly at his account McGinnis’s near the Garden, then joined the arena crowd.

The rink startled me—how large its surface, the dwarf-size nets: rope-like cages replicating how we laid our coats, not long and wide like soccer goals (as I had imagined). I was startled too by how cold the breeze off the ice. Carrying sticks like spears, the players skated around their own nets, two different-colored warm-up gyres grazing at their midpoints.

After the anthem a referee dropped the puck; suddenly there was a swarm of players in front of the Rangers goal, the goalie fell down, and a red light went on as the crowd booed. Boston scored again
almost immediately. Then the Rangers got to play with an extra man, a rule I knew nothing about. Andy Bathgate, the star, shot it from way out; somehow it went through the players in front of the net and bounced in. The light behind the Boston goal flashed and the crowd exploded.

For almost two periods thereafter, the Rangers surrounded the Boston net but were unable to put the puck in. The territory was always so clogged, and the rubber bounced zanily over it, onto it, and across its opening as ooo’s and aah’s undulated across the arena. By now I was totally in the frenzy, poised in expectation, sighing in disappointment. I loved the speed and bumptiousness, the dragon’s lairs for goals, the potential of illuminated flashes proclaiming scores. There were only a couple of desperate minutes left when Bob’s adopted favorite, Irv Spencer, passed to a player whose slicked-down black hair looked like his name, Dave Balon. As I strained to see, the red light went on; the game was tied. And that’s how it ended.

I blabbed about this event so much to Jonny that my enthusiasm became contagious and soon he was as involved as I was in the fate of the Rangers. That weekend we got Bob to take us to a game together.

The Rangers were beaten soundly by surging Detroit, but an announcement after the match took away some of the sting: for the first time in ten years, hockey would be on radio in New York—for the remainder of the season.

Several nights later Jon and I sat with our schoolbooks open, the radio beside us, the game beginning. I sensed trouble as my mother and Bob burst in the front door late, deep in altercation. They went straight to their room and continued shouting. I knew from the shift in cadence that their agitation had scapegoated us. Sure enough, Bob came marching down the hall as her emissary and directed his comments at me: “Just because you’ve stopped studying is no reason to drag this boy in too.”

Obediently I took the play-by-play into my study but kept Jonny posted on the score through the door.

A week later the Rangers and Red Wings met in a showdown. Jon and I kneeled by the radio: “Ingarfield and Ullman are ready.
The puck is dropped…. ”

Detroit seemed to score at will and took a quick 4-2 lead. Then a Ranger defenseman slid in a long shot. We clapped. My mother shouted a warning from her room. We lowered the volume. The Rangers scored after the next face-off, then again a minute later. We cheered with clenched fists in silence. But as the last seconds were counted off, the Rangers passing the puck around from player to player in ritual keep-away, we couldn’t contain ourselves. Our muffled shouts rose to squeals. “You better tell those two maniacs I’ve had enough of this nonsense. You started this crap with your goddamned hockey, and you’d better stop it right now.” I felt an old familiar rush of guilt.

I awaited Bob’s appearance. I knew well the blend of pain and anger that would be on his face, his lips pressed in bottled emotion.

“C’mon, Richard,” he pleaded. “Enough of this
chazerai.
Let this boy get back to his studies. What’s wrong with you? Have you quit dead on the last lap?”

I seemed to have. In lieu of homework I was playing a spinner baseball game in the bathroom, inventing a whole season between the two new National League franchises, the New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s. Using their expansion rosters to make out line-ups and keeping scorecards of every game, I brought stats from my made-up league to school, and Jake and our baseball crew perused them. Guys adopted favorite players; mine was the ex-Red Elio Chacon, now a Met. After Jake picked Merritt Ranew of the Colts, every Monday he came rushing up to me: “How’d my baby Ranew do over the weekend?” Once he even had me bring the game to his home in Yonkers. “C’mon, Merritt baby,” he shouted, as I spun away.

Then the real Mets took the field in spring training. I was enchanted by the look of former Cincinnati Red, Jay Hook, in his blue-and-orange New York uniform, blue letters across the front, throwing Met curves. It was like a whole unexplored Babylonian civilization suddenly in our midst, a new game on the radio dial, emerging fresh and untarnished by prior pennant races. The Mets didn’t have to win. Everything about them was novel and enthralling, even their names: Herb Moford, Choo Choo Coleman, Charlie
Neal, Larry Foss, Al Jackson, a menagerie of fairy-tale characters like the packs of Earthlings who replaced Flash Gordon in the days of P.S. 6. I was at the beginning of time again, among unknown legionnaires.

In the second exhibition game someone neither I nor the announcers had heard of named Rod Kanehl replaced Neal at second base and, a couple of innings later, ignited a game-tying rally with a single. All through spring training Kanehl continued to amaze, the master of 1-1 in the box score (one at-bat, one hit). Against all odds he made the team. Once in New York, he rode the subways recreationally; a fan darling, nicknamed The Mole, but I had spotted him first.

My performance at midterm now seemed contrived and pointless; I couldn’t wrest my mind back on studying. The bubble separating me from the world had dissolved. I saw crocuses and dandelions everywhere. From the classrooms of Tillinghast Hall I heard crows repeating calls they had always made, children raucous at play, workmen drilling into 242nd Street, the jargon and clatter of worldly commerce—a symphony that had been playing extrinsically. Now the cacophony was deafening.

Horace Mann had become unfamiliar, spooky and hollow without my noticing when or how. It was as though the buildings had stepped back into perspective and I viewed them now from afar, objectively—interdicted castles, decorous penitentiaries surrounded by a far vaster metropolis. Their halls and fusty rooms no longer fazed me; this wasn’t life and death—it was a suburban private school.

I saw the rust on lockers, each brown clump of granules defining a possible universe. Ants and flies commanded most of it even as we passed them insensibly. Now I recognized them, creatures as real and busy as me.

I noticed cobwebs in ceiling corners, spiders crawling along cracks, chips missing from moulding, sweaters and coats unclaimed for years. Why was all this suddenly so vivid and lucid? Why I did care so much when for years I simply came and went with assignments,
sustained by A’s and B’s?

Something was happening at the very roots of perception. It wasn’t Superman’s x-ray vision, but my focal plane had shifted its nodal point. I was entering an alternate kingdom of matter, one made of soot, desiccation, and decay.

My lessons, having come to their uncalculated conclusion, were regurgitating the sum of data crammed into a child’s brain. Framed and ingested as innocuous facts, they had been assimilated unconsciously, transubstantiated into minotaurs and mutts, merging finally with Nanny’s ghosts, the New York Highlanders, interpretation of dreams, Bill-Dave, the Hardy Boys, and Ken Holt to form something beyond recognition or ken. What I had been learning was now a world-view; whatever it sought to inculcate was my own. I no longer needed magisterial warrant to proceed; I had transcended the initiation and was
inside
the eros of corrosion, the syzygy of mere mass.

In Latin I was unprepared for the in-class translation for the first time in three years, so I got the tiniest of the punitive baseballs hurled at me. In math I couldn’t solve a new category of equations and failed a spot quiz. In history the nineteenth century rushed by, a thousand details from the Industrial Revolution and ensuing skirmishes. I couldn’t concentrate; I couldn’t pin down or memorize more facts, let alone all the secularisms of modernity. We were suddenly in the Balkans, World War I—hundreds of new names, dates, and battles unlearned, thickets of text, the twentieth century a tangled parody of all the centenaries that preceded it, the impending final exam a nightmare beyond reckoning. I didn’t care anymore; my mind had become a sieve. I had gotten into Amherst, but would I even graduate?

Forsythia sprang up like fire, bushes from Wordsworthian odes. I heard birds making rackets outside our windows, saw branches thick with leaves and blossoms. A ball of sun blazed insect wings over the field. Where had the time gone? My teachers looked gawky and sad, their authority crumbling into caricature. Underneath it all bubbled a new anxiety of not being prepared, slipping into the
backs of classes, praying not to be called on … breathing a sigh of relief when I wasn’t. This was
so
unknown.

I stared out the train window at landscapes and buildings and realized how many times I had viewed this scenery and now I was looking at it for just about the last time. Part of me belonged to it, and I didn’t even know what it was—black children playing in parks, old men walking like beetles, shadows of my vehicle careening down through shadows of tracks onto pedestrians and cars and cobblestones—so complicated and ineffable. I felt them like a disease, a light growing in me, a poison making me limp and thirsty. I felt much more too—solitude, impatience, longing—Dostoyevsky’s infinite spaces.

I remembered how it was once okay to notice spring remotely: the glad return of warm weather. But that fell short of a mushrooming reality, the way florescence burst from wintry slumber, interstices in every dimension at every scale of vine and bud. It had so long been a dream without a landscape, without real twigs and buds, cobble or dirt. Now the wind was subtle and vast, the May clouds palpable and creamy, cumulus and beyond cumulus, reaching for another designation and class of name. An unearthly light invaded every dandelion, each stone gargoyle; the air was filled with seeds—more than I could grasp or count.